Cannabis PR Can Destroy Dispensary Revenue

Cannabis PR Can Destroy Dispensary Revenue

How the wrong Cannabis PR plan can destroy your dispensary business revenue and customer traffic.

We had a client in a very large tourist destination that was about to become legal with recreational cannabis. They had been our client for over 2 years and were consistently ranking #1 for all of their city (dispensary/dispensaries/cannabis/medical marijuana/weed and mmj) keywords. Things were going great and traffic was climbing.

However, with out communicating to us the organization that owned the two dispensary locations started another business for dispensary associations and started a PR campaign that included our clients 2 locations as well as all the other competing dispensaries websites, locations and brands being mentioned and linked to all across the web.

This was fatal!

Instead of allowing us to continue to let Google know that ‘we were special’ they did their darnedest to let Google know basically that …no wait…’we are exactly the same as all these other dispensaries in the same city’.

Within 1 month they had lost 30% of their traffic to the competition’s dispensary locations within that city and within 6 months that drop accounted for almost 60%. This was after being number 1 for almost every city dispensary keyword for over a year.
2 months later that city…a tourist destination worldwide…passed laws making recreational cannabis legal. Traffic and sales went through the roof just due to the new customer base in fluxing into the region to experience legal weed.
They ranked 5-7. The two locations had a large portion of its equity sold for just shy of 63 million dollars. If they had never ran that PR campaign with another agency its not a far reach to think that price would have easily doubled or tripled and that’s a number that is being supremely low balled.

That’s 50-150 Million dollars at a minimum thrown away due to lack of guidance in just over 3-6 months.

If you are serious about expanding your cannabis brand with Google local cannabis SEO, Maps rankings and want to grow your dispensary footprint you need to partner with an experienced Search Engine Optimization ally. There is no better strategy than being a Reefferr client for dispensary SEO. We deliver top rankings, drive new revenue growth and can be trusted to accurately consult on the future and steer you to new heights each and every year.